In many cases, a surge of requests for data from a large number of clients may overload a content server or servers, resulting in unacceptable server response time, and leading users to seek content elsewhere. This may be detrimental to electronic commerce. In some instances, the most resource-intensive part of responding to a request for data is establishing a connection. For example, in addition to handshaking procedures, such as the 3-way handshake of TCP, a server may need to allocate memory, transmission buffers, packet control buffers, establish cryptographic keys, or perform other computationally-intensive tasks. Accordingly, rather than denying requests during a surge, it may be possible for an intermediary device deployed between the requesting clients and a server to delay some requests slightly to reduce the amount of connections being established at one time by the server while maintaining a higher throughput for a longer period.